Leadership
How You Get Things Done SCOTT ELLIS, ED.D.
I
s your life simpler than it was a year ago? As I write this column, we have completed one lap around the sun since the pandemic was declared. It is helpful to ask oneself this question even in mundane years. Is my life simpler than it was a year ago? Simpler, as in less cluttered, more focused, less complicated. Put another way, are you focusing your energy and time on the things that matter most to you? We normally use culture to describe the way in which a society, an organization, or even a family gets things done. This includes both the written and tribal knowledge. When I use the term to discuss an individual’s culture, I am talking about how that person gets things done, knowing that it is affected by conscious choices and unquestioned perceptions and methods based on personal experience. So, if I aspire to a simpler life, I will start with these disciplines:
30
BOXSCORE May/June 2021
• Make more conscious choices. • Examine those choices I make automatically. • Prioritize according to what is most important to me. • Reduce or eliminate the expense of time and energy on everything else. Let’s use an exemplary 30-something professional to illustrate the steps of this exercise. Her name is Danielle Tyger. Make More Conscious Choices Danielle is the rare millennial who manages her time based on yes rather than no. She has taken the time to think about what is most important to her, the activities and expenses of time and bandwidth that merit her attention. These are the things she desires to say yes to. She finds it easier now to say no to the priorities of others, because she knows what she values most. She is ambitious in goals for both career advancement and the health of relationships with
her spouse and their child. She feels that she has lost any semblance of work-life balance this past year. She is currently working to better articulate her goals and her values with the hope of improving her decision-making and reducing her yeses. Examine Automatic Choices Next, Danielle looks more closely at the choices she makes without much forethought. These include some decisions made under stress or fatigue when we tend to switch to autopilot mode. Some of them are impulsive reactions she calls “oh what the heck” choices that rarely end well. Still others seemed rational until she examined them and saw that they were based on family norms and practices that she had not questioned. Prioritize Based on What Is Important to You Danielle pushed back on this idea, because she saw it as a selfish way to look
